"There's only one thing worse than BBC job cuts," moaned one staffer yesterday afternoon. "And that's the meetings afterwards." Such weariness is understandable: employees have just been through three years of cutbacks - now they face five years with more of the same. All the redundancies put together will merely return staff numbers roughly to where they were in 2000, when Greg Dyke took over as director general. Where his headstrong management dumped the orthodoxy of bimedial journalists (working for both TV and radio), yesterday brought back the idea - only this time for a trimedial newsroom (TV, radio and online). As Mr Dyke used to say: it is only a repeat if you've seen it before.

The staff may be dizzy from all the pendulum-swinging, but for management this is more than cyclical change: it is meant to be for the long term. Forget the idea that these cutbacks were the inevitable response to a disappointing licence-fee settlement. The licence fee is still going up, and the deal was not so bad as to warrant nearly 2,000 net redundancies and a 10% reduction in original programming. This upheaval is largely about preparing the BBC for a new technological era, in which the audience will demand programmes not when the schedules dicate but anytime, anywhere. "Martini media", it is called at Television Centre, but newspapers and broadcasters everywhere are grappling with the same issue. Judging by yesterday's announcements, the BBC has decided that two big answers are making one newsroom work for different media and putting more programmes online. There will be more such initiatives over the next few years, but for now the Corporation is as unsure as every other media company about what the digital future holds.

At least the BBC goes into this murk with a guaranteed yearly income of up to £3.5bn. But here too, director general Mark Thompson appears to be preparing for a different future. He should have been more open about the fact. Many at the Corporation doubt the licence-fee system will last much longer. Some assume it will disappear entirely over the next few years; others believe the money will have to be shared with rival broadcasters, such as Channel 4.

This prospect appears to have shaped Mr Thompson's thinking. Rather than simple, straightforward cost-cutting - shutting down entire services - he has drawn up a plan for a broadcaster that remains big and universal. Others (including rivals) would like the BBC to retreat from popular programming. But if the Corporation is going to become more self-sufficient, it cannot just produce the unwatchable, the unlistenable and the unprofitable.

Were the BBC just another large multi-national media firm, the five-year plan unveiled yesterday would be assessed in purely strategic terms. But it is not just another media business. A lot more is expected from this particular broadcaster - and not only because of the way it is funded. If Mr Thompson wants to keep BBC3, at the cost of greater cuts elsewhere, he needs to demonstrate what the Corporation can bring to youth programming. At the moment the answer appears to be: not much. Its schedules full of expletive-laden titles are almost as depressing as the actual shows. But the BBC should be offering a standard by which others should be judged. As ITV's own report into its call-in deceptions showed again yesterday, standards are something British broadcasters seem to lack.

What Mr Thompson called "efficiency gains" yesterday are really just cuts. Cut too far or too crudely and the BBC could endanger some of its most distinctive programmes: not just Newsnight and Today but documentaries and children's TV. It could also lead to strikes by staff, who bosses have not consulted nearly enough in making their plans. This will be a difficult operation that must be conducted sensitively. And it will be done in full public view.